Einstein

Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Fascinating and lovingly crafted. Isaacson approaches his subject with the utmost regard and a clear desire to explain what we might call ambiguous or controversial aspects of Einstein's life. The book certainly doesn't lack in detail. There are 550 pages of narrative biography and a massive list of sources and notes from correspondence between Einstein and colleagues as well as family and friends as well as his notes and personal papers and archival material that must have been painstakingly researched indeed.

Isaacson takes a three-fold approach to Einstein's life that is clear from the way the chapters are separated, though he does attempt a somewhat chronological approach. Einstein's life is divided into three major themes: his scientific work, his personal life, and his political or public life. I have to admit I was much more comfortable with the first and third than the second. Reading his love letters or learning the personal details about how he kept his house seemed a bit too voyeuristic to me. One can debate philosophically whether or not that is the just consequence of so public a life, but it still feels wrong. Nevertheless, the other two elements are more than enough to joyfully push the narrative along at a fascinating clip.

Isaacson portrays Einstein as an iconoclast, a rebel that did most of his best scientific, political and even religious thinking standing in direct contradistinction to the prevailing currents. This is certainly true in his younger years within the realm of science and to a certain degree even with his political involvement between the World Wars. Relativity, both the special and general theories, certainly met with a lot of opposition among the scientific establishment at the time and faced a long uphill battle before gaining acceptance. In his older years, Einstein became more attached to the classical physical world that he grew up with and was very reluctant to accept advances in Quantum Mechanics that were producing eminently consistent results experimentally. He sums up the transition in his life with typical self-reflective good humor, "To punish me for my contempt of authority, fate made me an authority myself." Einstein is a solid work with a strong scientific background that explains fundamental concepts quite well. Having read a lot of popular physics stuff lately, I thought I'd find a lot of the descriptions of the laws and discoveries to be tedious. This was not the case. What Isaacson adds is the subjective elements of discovery, the historical context for such ideas that makes them fascinating in an altogether different light. The ideas aren't stated as maxims, they're proposed as radical departures from prevailing wisdom and debated, often in the voices of Einstein's contemporaries - Bohr, Born, Heisenberg, Planck, Poincaré and too many others to do them sufficient justice. Underlying the ideas that transformed science is a running philosophical theme that Isaacson also does a fantastic job at highlighting: the nature of reality and humanity's ability, or inability, to know it, capture it, and explain it. You get more than a biography of the legend, but a biography of the turn of the century with all its prejudices, excitement, fervor and imagination. Even the quaint seems historically momentous and precious to preserve.

Counterintuitively, I found the second half of the book recounting Einstein's "unproductive" years to be more interesting than the first. I liked the older Einstein and it was a joy to read about all the anecdotes that contributed to his quite real absent-minded professor image. In these years Einstein took to politics, philosophy and religion, proving that he was not only probably the greatest scientist that ever lived, but the greatest thinker and humanist as well. Isaacson notes several instances of intense debate over political issues that Einstein held passionately. It was nice to see, in spite of these passions, that he was magnanimous when proven wrong and was quick to abandon positions that became untenable or that he learned were incorrect like his modified views on pacifism, religion and his own Jewish cultural identity.

On a personal level, Isaacson is deeply and uncomfortably probing and probably more than a little too forgiving of Einstein for several rather large personal lapses in judgment, shrugging them off as personal quirks. Skirting the issues of his personal relations, I found sections of analysis on his celebrity and his reaction to celebrity rather interesting. It's hard to imagine, even in todays age where science has been popularized by other great minds like Sagan, that a scientist, especially one dealing in abstruse theoretical and in the case of general relativity and unified field theory almost purely mathematical concepts, could garner the fame that he did, almost without effort. Thousands would come to see him and it seemed from newspaper accounts that the public almost reveled in the fact that they had no idea what he was talking about. As Chaplin once said to him at a movie premier: "They cheer me because they all understand me, they cheer you because no one understands you." I think there's some truth to this and I think part of the reason we love Einstein so much is because he represents the idea that human beings can transcend the limits of life and push the boundaries of what we think real or practical. The fact the he's still the icon for such thinking in a world where science has moved on to the truly complex and mind-boggling is a testament to just how much he really revolutionized our understanding of the way the universe works.

It was also interesting to see how the lay public reacted to such mind and universe altering ideas. Particularly exasperating for Einstein was the conflation of relativity with a philosophy of moral relativism, which he lamented frequently. The press, then as now, with nothing better to do speculate and speculate and speculate until all they're left with is absurdities. "Does relativity mean there's no such thing as right and wrong?" Which is more of a question of semantics than the result of the research and findings of Einstein himself. These questions would haunt him the rest of his life in the public forum as Nazis and anti-Semites used it to cast a lurid glow over what "Jewish science" was doing to the moral fabric of Germany or American conservatives thought were clear indications of Soviet sympathies. Absurd, to be sure, but an interesting historical theme: the uneducated, yet vitriolic grasping on to key words and bending their meaning to their political advantage (like Socialism in the press today). Einstein himself was a proponent of socialism. I wonder how that would fly in the red states today? Would they act like conservatives in Germany and Europe and use it as a basis to reject not just the man's political ideology, but his science as well? I'd like to think not, but humanity still tends to have the rather unfortunate habit of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's a disease in politics today as it was in Einstein's time.

Review-wise, Isaacson does a remarkable job with a lot of source material, and while some of it can be redundant, he tightly focuses his narrative around readily identifiable themes that give purpose and meaning to Einstein's place in history. His prose is unpretentious, dignified, and direct, features that Gleick's biography of Newton probably could have benefited from. With all the biographies of Einstein on the market, it's still hard to imagine any that could top this one. Very highly recommended.

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The Universe in a Black Hole

Dr. David Lowe of Brown University recently won a research grant from FQXi to research something very peculiar: whether or not our entire universe exists in something like a black hole. The title and the proposal sound enigmatic and groundbreaking, but it is doubtful that our entire universe exists inside a literal black hole. Instead, what Lowe is proposing is the expansion of an idea first proposed by physicist Gerard 't Hooft when studying information loss and entropy with respect to black holes, namely, the Holographic Principle.

What 't Hooft and other physicists like Stephen Hawking were curious about was what happened to objects and the information they represent when they crossed the event horizon of a black hole, that mysterious point of no return on approach to a black hole where the force of its gravitational attraction is so strong that even an escape velocity equal to the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) would not be enough to free you from its pull.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics basically states that the entropy of the universe always increases with time. It's a fundamental concept that most physicists think gives direction to the arrow of time and why we perceive things moving in a certain direction and why we can remember the past and not the future. The Second Law has gone through a number of formulations as the field of physics has evolved, but has stayed true nonetheless. In the mechanical age of Industrialization it was used by thermodynamically oriented engineers and physicists to simply state that heat never flows from a colder body to a hotter one. Makes sense right? If you put a cube of ice in a room temperature glass of water, the ice cube doesn't give off heat making the water warmer and the cube colder. On the contrary, the opposite happens and the water heats the ice cube until it goes through a phase transition and becomes water as well. With the advent of atomistic theories toward the end of the 19th century and Boltzmann's creation of a statistical way of examining and explaining this behavior the Second Law was recast yet again. This time, the definition included a new word: entropy (a statistical measure of the amount of disorder in a system). Boltzmann mainly studied gases, hypothetical boxes of gases and the interplay between the particles of gas and how they occupied and their arrangements evolved over time. He found that another way of saying the Second Law is this: ordered things tend, over time, to evolve into disordered things. If we take a box and place a divider in the middle and fill one side with oxygen, we have an ordered system. Exactly half the box contains all the oxygen particles, the other is a vacuum. Remove the divider and let the oxygen move freely. If you came back in an hour, chances are you'd find a more disordered box. Particles of oxygen would be all over the place and would no longer be neatly arranged on one side or in one corner. The gas would fill the space to create a sort of equilibrium. Imagine the same thing happening with two gases in the box instead of one - oxygen on the right, nitrogen on the left. Remove the divider, and the gases would mix and it would be incredibly difficult to separate them again. Why does this happen? Simple statistics. It's far more likely to find something mixed, heterogeneous and disordered than it is to find something neatly arranged. Therefore, the system will tend toward the most likely scenario. It's not that the box can't spontaneously separate, it can, but it's exceedingly unlikely to find the atoms in their original configuration neatly arranged with nitrogen on one side and oxygen on another.  Atoms are constantly moving, never standing still, and as a result, ordered systems break down. With the dawn of the information age, Claude Shannon put another twist on the Second Law. All of the particles in a box of gas represent bits and pieces of information. In order to describe the state of the box at any given time we have to be able to describe the position and momentum of given particles. The more particles, the more information required to describe the box accurately. In its initial state, the box is easy to describe. "There are 30 atoms of oxygen on one side and 30 atoms of nitrogen on the other." Not a lot of information is necessary to describe this. Once the gases mingle freely, it becomes increasingly more difficult to describe the state of the box. You need to convey more information about each individual particle to get an accurate picture. "Oxygen atom #1 is in the upper left corner of the box at this particular moment, but moving away from that corner at a speed of..." For each of the 60 atoms. Entropy (disorder) can also refer to the amount of information in a system as well. So if entropy always increases, so does the amount of information needed to describe a system.

http://cde.nwc.edu/SCI2108/course_documents/stars/smallest/black_holes.htm

Black holes presented a bit of a problem. Once an object, a particle for instance, is sucked into a black hole, it is forever beyond our cosmic horizon, we can never see it or gain any information about it ever again. In fact, the "no hair theorem" states that all black holes are essentially the same, and information about what they potentially swallowed or how they were created is forever lost. This is a direct contradiction of the Second Law. Information cannot be lost in these black holes. If it was, the entropy of the universe as a whole would decrease as more and more stuff was swallowed up.

Back to the Holographic Principle. What t'Hooft and others like Hawking discovered was that information isn't really lost. You can't tell what exact particles were swallowed by a black hole, but you can tell how much it has in it. When a particle like a photon is consumed by a black hole, the size of the black hole's event horizon increases in three dimensional space. A better way of putting it is that it's surface area increases. The area is what's important to us because we can't know what's beyond that surface. Think of an opaque balloon being blown up. The more air inside the balloon, the larger the balloon gets - it's surface area stretches to compensate for the new material inside. From the outside, we can't tell what filled up the balloon because we can't see into it through the rubber, it could be oxygen, nitrogen, helium, hydrogen, whatever, but we know that there's more stuff in it if it gets bigger (yes I know we can kind of guess based on how the ballon interacts with the atmosphere, whether it's lighter than air or not...) Similarly, black holes get bigger when they're fed and we can calculate the entropy (the amount of information in a black hole) as a function of that surface area. Specifically, the entropy is equal to (1/4*Area)/(hG) where h is Planck's constant and G is the gravitational constant. In reality, information is not lost because it is encoded on the surface area of black holes. If the universe as a system includes those black holes, then the total entropy of the universe never decreases because the loss of visible information about the universe is captured and recorded on the surface areas of all of the black holes in the universe.

What's interesting is that the universe seems to preserve three dimensions worth of information (particles have length, width, and depth) on a two dimensional surface. Like a hologram. A hologram is printed in two dimensions, but when reflected in the light, forms a three dimensional image. What physicists like Lowe are beginning to speculate is whether or not the entire universe behaves the same way. If we went to the outer boundaries of the universe, would we find that the universe, like a balloon that is inflating, preserves all the information about everything that's inside it on its surface area? More radically, is the universe fundamentally two dimensional with the third dimension a mere projection? We experience three dimensions because we're inside the hologram, but that third dimension could be an illusion. This line of reasoning could have profound implications for the laws of physics. Newton's laws and relativity are postulated on the assumption that the universe has three spatial dimensions and these laws successful predict mechanical motion, but the more we delve into the realm of the very small, the more we see a disjoint between the way tiny things behave and the way larger objects behave. Newton and Einstein break down in the realm of the very small. Could it be because those laws only explain what life is like in the simulated third dimension and don't apply to a "reality" that's only two dimensions? Maybe.

There's quite a bit of research going on in this field and results are coming out all the time confirming it or signaling its death. I'll give a couple examples tomorrow.

Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton by James Gleick

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Perhaps I'm predisposed, keeping figures like Einstein and Feynman in mind, to the idea that great minds are inherently liberal. Not in politics necessarily, but in personality. It's hard to imagine someone of the intellectual stature of the inventor of the calculus and modern mechanics not being magnanimous, generous, giving and wanting to share his success with the world; being encouraging to fellows pursuing difficult questions and charitable in his political stances toward the accumulation and practice of new scientific knowledge. Gleick's cutting biography of Newton has disabused me of this notion.



Revealed through Mr. Newton's own personal correspondence and notes comes to light a figure that is craven, withdrawn, and as petty and vindictive as he was absolutely, stunningly, incomprehensibly brilliant. His mind and his achievements put into perspective what we might call "genius" by modern standards and force us to see how short that term falls. Around his work is built the edifice of modern science, a three hundred year quest formulated and enabled by the "tools" Newton created mostly in seclusion during the plague years 1665-1666 from his family home in Woolsthorpe. A more brooding significant historical figure can hardly be imagined, except perhaps for some of the later histories and accounts of the life of Lincoln.



I'd read some spurious anecdotes about Newton's proclivities form other historians of science, mainly Bill Bryson in his Brief History of Nearly Everything that created some cracks in the lustrous portrait we've painted of the legend since the time of his death, but Gleick's account delves much further to reveal just how unstable and truly friendless Newton was. Not that he was without admirers, though perhaps he accumulated those in far greater numbers after he was dead and not around to harangue, cajole, manipulate and condescend to them any more. He spent thirty-five years at Cambridge, most of them as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics and in the entire time there, produced not a single friend. He was introspective and fearful of the judgment of others to the point of hysteria at times, and his writings, painstakingly collected and organized by Gleick reveal it.



Gleick is a phenomenal historian of science in that he is perfectly comfortable with the ideas he is trying to convey as well as the historical impact of the ideas themselves. His prose fluctuates from the intimidatingly terse, in a Cormac McCarthy style of recounting, to the lofty and eloquent, elevating the figures of his narrative and their achievements to awe-inspring status. It's at once revelatory and myth-making - a balance of the real and pragmatic and the idyllic and I like it a lot. That being said, I think that the book's narrative also fluctuates between really captivating anecdotes and analysis to pages of quotations from Newton or his contemporaries that attempt to let them tell the story themselves with little analysis in between on the historical import of such events or happenings.



Having read The Information first, I can clearly see this book as a period of gestation for those later themes and ideas, particularly the role that information and it's effective communication was going to have on the technological and scientific developments that were to come. Of particular interest to Gleick again in this work is symbology - the connection between words, symbols and ideas and the literal things they represent. It's difficult to imagine talking about things like Newton's laws of mechanics without the proper terminology, which he had to invent, or re-appropriate from their common usage. Words like force, mass, gravity, all had to be redefined to fit into a new paradigm of motion broken free from the millennia long grip of Aristotelean philosophy. But whereas The Information had a unifying theme, this book does not. Granted, it is biography, the objective of which is to tell a life story. Perhaps it's a wonderful conceit that Gleick avoids making judgments on Newton and lets the man speak for himself across the centuries, but at the same time, I was hoping for more. What do we make of Newton? What place does he hold in history? Is he a fundamental figure that defines the beginning of the modern era in reason, science and mathematics? Was he the last of a line of animists who believed in magic and superstition (he was a devoted and secretive alchemist most of his life as well)? Was he a bridge between? The reader is left free to interpret his life on its own, but as such it feels more like an encyclopedic entry, or a tome of primary source material than an historical analysis.



Think this one is about three and a half stars for me, but I'll choose to be conservative and round down. I guess that makes it 3.4999. Still, a great book if all you know about Newton is what your math or physics teacher told you about in passing and the amount of work put in to the research for this book is no laughing matter at all. Gleick's bibliography and notes run almost seventy pages. He knows his stuff and he knows how to organize it and he's definitely cemented himself in my opinion is the finest science historian and commentator of the present era, a true successor to people like Thomas Khun.



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It from bit

 "It is not unreasonable to imagine that information sits at the core of physics, just as it sits at the core of a computer. 

It from bit. Otherwise put, every 'it'—every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits. 'It from bit' symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes–no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe."                                                              

- John Archibald Wheeler

Having just finished James Gleick's The Information, and since we've spent so much time on cosmology, I thought I'd try to make a brief post encapsulating one of the more esoteric views of the universe - the digital view. There's a big debate in physics as to whether or not reality is digital or analog. Simply put, is the universe continuous, or can it be divided up, or sampled, into discrete bits. A growing number of physicists and philosophers have taken the novel approach towards conceptualizing the universe as information, usually leaning toward the discrete view. It's not just that information and its transmission is important in the universe - it's that that is the purpose of the universe. 

This is a radical and pretty mind-blowing idea that is self-consistent and probably just as valid as any other worldview when it comes to the purpose of the universe, or why we are here - after all these are mainly philosophical questions. The suggestion is that all of the processes in the universe are designed to preserve and pass on information. At a very basic level information is preserved about everything that has ever happened in our universe. Astronomers and cosmologists study the early history of our universe by examining the imprint of those early times and events upon the world around us today, the cosmic microwave background, light emitted from extremely distant sources, extremely long ago. As discussed in the previous post, the entire history of the motion of the particles of the universe is preserved in the current motion and direction of those particles. If one were to reverse their positions and momentums, one could (theoretically) construct a perfect picture of the past by rewinding everything to some previous point simply by following Newton's laws in reverse. The information about a star going supernova is transmitted via light (photons) and the momentum of heavier elements ejected from it's core to leave its imprint on the neighboring parts of the universe. What Wheeler is getting at is that every particle, and every property of a particle is a physical manifestation of information no different from a 1 or a 0 in a binary code that transmits instructions in an algorithm to the next process. Spin up, spin down, polarity, left-handed, right-handed, charge - it's all just information contained in something and that information is transferred and exchanged when particles come in contact with one another. This information is processed, absorbed by other parts of the universe, molded, shaped, used to create new processes or simply observed and wondered at by groups of particles we call sentient life. 

And what is life? Life, as Richard Dawkins argues in The Selfish Gene, is nothing more than a vehicle for the preservation of genetic information. Complex, macroscopic, multi-cellular life serves the all powerful genetic code imprinted on our DNA, a chemical construct at its most basic level, to replicate itself and to transmit the information of its existence, its chemical arrangement, into the future. In short, life may exist in the information-theoretic model, as a means by which chemical components make copies of themselves like files that automatically copy on your computer. Yet it can be even more abstract than that. Life itself can be made to serve ideas, information in its truest sense. Buried within The Selfish Gene, is a chapter in which Dawkins coined a term popular on the internet today: memes.

From Wikipedia: "A meme ( /ˈmiːm/) is an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. While genes transmit biological information, memes are said to transmit ideas and belief information. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures. Memes can be viewed as purely informational, having no real physical existence. It can be conceptual: the notion of love, for example, musical or artistic, a composition by Asian Kung-Fu Generation. What is music anyway? Are the notes on a piece of paper music? Are the instruments? Is the recording of a song, the actual song? It's an idea - yet it's an idea that lives, almost akin to a virus, by spreading from host mind to host mind through a variety of mediums from spoken word to the internet via Youtube. Life serves these ideas by channeling them and transmitting them - passing them on. And this isn't an anthropocentric view either. The idea of using tools for example and even some basic cultural behavior, traditions, for lack of a better word, can be seen being passed on in primates as well. Species specific hunting techniques can be learned in a group setting, particularly among the brighter of Earth's inhabitants, like Dolphins.

Moreover, ideas, even purely abstract ones (communism?) do indeed have a physical existence in the universe. The idea of communism is stored electrochemically in the memory of human brains, on pages in books, on bits of magnetic tape on hard drives and these ideas feed off one another, grow in complexity and evolve as the universe does.

We've left the realm of physics here and strayed into philosophy, but it's an interesting idea and one well-worth pursuing. Perhaps the most fundamental, basic interactions and explanations of what the universe is made of and why it exists will forever be beyond our reach if we keep looking for physical or chemical explanations like String Theory. Perhaps, strings exist only as an idea, and the idea itself is enough to give rise to the entirety of the universe. I know, I'm really pushing it here. Or am I? Nobel prize winning scientist George Wald once said, "It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms." Or, if you prefer Neils Bohr's more succinct version, "A physicist is just an atoms way of looking at itself." Either way you parse it, both scientists seemed to be way ahead of the information revolution in saying that the universe is information and we are merely the way that the universe thinks about (or processes) itself. What would the universe be doing if sentient life weren't around to experience it? Tree falling in the woods anyone?

Cosmic Invariance

If the universe is truly cyclic in nature, does that mean its evolution is as well? In cyclic cosmologies, the universe expands from a singularity and evolves, mostly according to Newton's laws of motion (let's leave quantum effects out of the picture for now). From the starting singularity, there's a burst of energy and expansion. As particles expand outward, they come into contact with one another - they trade energies, repel, coalesce with new momentum and continue on their way. In this respect, the analogy of a game of pool is very apt. Think of the starting singularity as the initial break and the subsequent motions and interactions all under the control and guidance of Newtonian mechanics. If you knew the exact position and momentum of each and every particle, you could figure out where any one would be and what it would be doing a billion or one hundred billion years from now. In short, the universe is deterministic and clockwork for the most part. Furthermore, and more to the point of this post, the universe appears to be a closed system like a box of gas or a pool table with balls in motion on it.

Henri Poincaré. Note the spiffy glasses and awesome beard.
Why did I shave?

In the late nineteenth century, mathematician Henri Poincaré, as part of an attempt to solve the infamous "three body problem" (in short, how three objects would move under the influence of mutual gravitational pull) stumbled upon something he called the Recurrence Theorem. This was the heyday of statistical mechanics and Boltzmann's descriptions of entropic forces and the evolution of closed systems was in many ways the central focus of physics. What Poincaré discovered, put simply, was that if you started a closed system (one free of outside physical influence) in any particular configuration and let it evolve according to Newton's laws of dynamics (motion), and if you had an infinite amount of time to wait and observe, that system would eventually return to its initial configuration, not just once, but over and over again. The fewer the components you have the shorter the recurrence time would be and the more you add, the longer you'd have to wait. The universe is home to more particles than can possibly be imagined, so the recurrence time would be huge - but if the universe is really eternal (and closed), it is virtually guaranteed to return to its initial state and evolve precisely along the same lines all over again.

Think about what that means for a moment. Every single event in the history of your life, in the history of the universe, would be bound to repeat itself, over and over and over again - with no variation within those particular evolutions. How long would we have to wait for one recurrence time for the universe? A box with sixty particles in it has a recurrence time of the present age of the universe. In other words, it would take a box of sixty particles nearly 14.7 billion years to return to its initial configuration, statistically speaking of course. By comparison, a typical macroscopic object, made up of much, much more than sixty measly particles, has a recurrence time would be 10^{1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000} seconds. (Carroll, 205-206).

The idea of recurrence seems much more profound than mere fate. A typical determinist may look at the universe and say, "Well, it's all in motion like a train and cannot be stopped." Life unfolds, the universe evolves and there's no tampering with it. It's almost like a movie playing itself out, but that analogy isn't quite right because it's as if we, the observers are part of the movie too. Our reactions to it, indeed, even whether we recognize it as such, has already been determined as part of the story. But if Poincaré is correct, and he is mathematically, if not physically, then it's a movie on repeat - a disc stuck in a dvd player, but you'd never recognize it as such. If a cyclic cosmology is correct and the universe indeed goes through expansion and contraction phases infinitely into the future with a sort of bounce in between, then certainly some, though probably not all, of the expansions may create histories that look exactly like our own, given we wait long enough. The life you experience now may be the very first of a series of repetitions you can do nothing about or control - or, it could be the 1,000,913,456th. It may happen all over again in the very next cycle the universe goes through, or it may take another ninety evolutions, but here you'd be all over again - with the same joys and frustrations, accomplishments and failures.

Even more interesting: in an endlessly cycling universe there are bound to be cycles where the history or evolution is dramatically different. Ones in which no sentient life forms exist or evolve at all, for example. Or, it could have evolutions that are quite similar, but subtly different (from a cosmic perspective at least). There could be alternate histories and evolutions where Hitler was never born (a favorite for alternative history science fiction fodder), or where you were born in another country, to another set of parents (but would it still be you?). All it would take is the subtle displacement of a single hydrogen atom or a change in vector of a single electron to change the whole subsequent history of the universe, giving birth to different realities and different histories each time the universe expands anew.

Could you be born into a family of Wookies because an electron
zigs instead of zags in the next expansion cycle of the
universe?

Is it true? Are we doomed (or blessed) to live the lives we have now forever? For truly any other evolution, no matter how slightly different, would result in an us that is not us and therefore different. This reality is all that we have. Well, there's a couple of snags that complicate Poincaré's picture:

1. What we know of quantum mechanics seems to suggest that there is an inherent level, not of randomness, but probability to reality itself. Virtual particles pop into and out of existence, leaving their mark, no matter how subtle in a myriad ways - causing black holes to evaporate or contributing to mysterious macroscopic behaviors like the Casimir Effect. In short, ephemeral instability and unpredictability have a subtle effect on macroscopic objects and their motion or movement. If such events truly are part of the fabric of reality, they would perpetually disturb the motion of electrons and other subatomic particles and alter the history of each subsequent expansion or history. Would it still be possible for the same evolution to occur, down to the same perturbations? Maybe. Probably, given that you had an infinite amount of time to sit around and wait, but the recurrence time would be even more monstrously huge.

2. On a more concrete level, we know that the universe is expanding. Leave aside whether or not the universe is indeed closed or open, or if we're one pocket universe nestled in a multiverse of other universes - cosmologists know that objects in the universe are moving away from one another. Not only that, but they're doing so at an accelerating rate. In short, that's bad news for cyclic cosmologies. When is contraction going to occur? By what means? It seems like expansion will continue into the future unchecked, stretching the particulate matter of the universe into a thin gruel spread over even more unimaginable distances. It's hard to imagine a spontaneous contraction that would reverse then start the cycle all over again. It seems far more likely that the universe will suffer entropic heat death and it'll all end in a Big Freeze.

3. Even more basically, cyclic cosmologies may be inherently incorrect, the reason stated in point #2 being just one flaw of such theories (see earlier posts).

4. Even among those who embrace cyclic cosmologies, like Roger Penrose, there are those (again, like Penrose) who believe that events in one expansion cycle effect events in the next. Penrose believes that events in the previous cycle have left imprints on the Cosmic Microwave Background that are visible today. Those imprints, speculated to be caused by supermassive black holes near the end of the contraction of a previous cycle, surely would affect the motion of particles in this expansionary phase. In short, there is no repetitive, or recurring cycle as events in one cycle have specific effects on the next.

Granted, I'm no expert, but I tend to think that while recurrence is a pretty thought-provoking and amazing idea to think about, it has no strong scientific backing. Poincaré's math is solid. If you really did have a closed system and we only considered Newtonian physics, recurrence would occur. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I don't think the universe is quite as neat or simple as a box of gas.

Carroll, Sean. From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. London: Plume Books, 2010.

The Information

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The Information is so comprehensive and so multifaceted it almost defies categorization, unless that category you're looking for is: awesome. It's a history, a paradigm for looking at the development and future of human culture, a conception of the physical universe and much, much more besides. Gleick writes tremendous prose that gives a sense of how epic the development and processing of information throughout human history has been. The work is a mix of hard science and a softer narrative that tells the compelling story of the scientists, mathematicians and great minds that helped to foster the information revolution and usher in the Information Age.



The Information is certainly ambitious. Gleick begins by examining the interplay of communication and the transmission of knowledge, tracing information preservation from the oral history phase of Classical culture and, earlier yet, to the talking drums of Africa, straight on to the development of symbols as writing systems. What's great here, is that The Information doesn't read like pure history, though that would be good as well. Throughout, especially beginning with the chapter on writing and mathematical symbology, Gleick begins a process of reflection which mirrors the self-reflection that writing allowed human beings to pursue for the first time - it allowed for the development of logic and for language to become aware of itself. One thing quickly becomes apparent and thematic: each successive historical development in communication or information transmission/preservation led to a sort of crisis of culture; a war developed between those that championed the new technology and medium and those that were resistant. Interestingly enough, this dated all the way back to Plato, who feared that the new medium of writing would forever damage the development of knowledge and wisdom by fixing words, stories, lessons static. He puts it much more eloquently by saying that the element of interaction is removed. In the Socratic sense, knowledge was constructed by dialogue, by questioning and answering. A book, Plato quipped, gives the same answer no matter what question is posed to it. People feared the same thing with telegraphy and telephony, that the new medium changed the way people communicated - for the worst. One hears echoes of the criticisms of texting, tweeting, and blogging, destroying "proper" modes of communication. I found the cycle presented to be comforting and enlightening to say the least. It's too easy to get caught up in the present age and take for granted that the revolution you're experiencing, while new and fundamentally different from anything before, is felt the same way by human beings nonetheless. We persist.



Embedded in the historical narrative are biographical sketches that give the narrative character and charm. Each age had it's information prophet from Charles Babbage and the admirable and witty Ada Byron-Lovelace to the greatest of all information scientists, Claude Shannon. Each has a rich personal history and personality, well-told by Gleick too, that left an imprint on the age they were a part of, deterministically and inexorably leading to the Information Age that has enveloped the planet.



Alongside the narrative are neat departures into the hard and soft sciences. Gleick succinctly captures the role that information plays in the transmission of culture (particularly good is the chapter on memetics and memes in general), the preservation of knowledge and the physio-psychological impact so much preserved information has on the human system, information's role in biology, especially in the transmission and retention of genetic information, the economic effects of cheaper and more prolific and detailed information, and lastly, and most provocatively, the role that information plays as a physical part of the universe through bizarre and mysterious physical phenomena like entanglement and entropy. Each reflection neatly accompanies a natural historical progression that unfolds in a way that makes you eager for the next development in the same way that one is eager to complete a suspenseful novel. There's a sense that another major revelation is right around the corner, and the book is unputdownable.



The book closes with some rather thought-provoking questions, which might have been better, if Gleick deigned not to answer. Most importantly, and most chillingly: What is the effect of living in a culture or society in which all information is preserved, regardless of value? Is it harder to construct meaning? Is it harder to wade through the refuse and detritus, ridiculous, nonsensical Youtube videos, banal tweets, blog posts that begin and seemingly get no further than, "Today was a good day. The sky was blue"? Every bit of information gets locked away, preserved and must be sifted through to find relevance. Will we drown in a deluge of doggerel? As we become more and more reliant on filters and search engines, are we ceding control over this information to a relative few, such as Google? As a trained historian, I tend not to be so pessimistic. A deeper record will allow for greater cultural analysis, economic analysis, and in short, just better self-reflection for us as a species. If we find that most of what we preserve is useless and foolish, what does it tell us about ourselves? More importantly, what do we intend to do about it?



Great book.



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Baby Universes

In an earlier post I discussed the debate between proponents of an eternal model of the universe and those who champion one that has had a finite existence. Many of the models proposed for an eternal universe are multiversic in nature. In other words, they get around the problem of a calculable beginning to our universe reversing the expansion of the big bang some 14 billion years to a point of origin by nesting our universe into a larger framework of some kind that actually is eternal. It's a brilliant scheme. In that way, we can say that "our universe" (though this becomes somewhat of a misnomer if there are things besides the all-encompassing, singular universe) did have a beginning in time, but that the multiverse is eternal and sprouting new universes quite frequently and forever.

How or why does the multiverse create new universes? Again, there are a number of different proposals for how this might happen, from eternal inflation which creates a sort of patchwork universe with bubble universes layered into the fabric of a singular flat multiverse (think of a quilt with the whole blanket being the multiverse and the patches being universes separated from each other by the knitting, but infinite in size) to a newer proposal by physicists Sean Carroll and Jennifer Chen called "Baby Universes," first discussed in 2004 here and elaborated upon by Carroll in his book From Eternity to Here.

In his book, Carroll explores the mysteries of the arrow of time. Why do we perceive time to be "flowing" in a single direction? The argument basically boils down to the second law of thermodynamics and entropy. The direction of time is regulated by the tendency of entropy (the amount of disorder in a system, or the amount of information needed to describe the state of a system, if you're into information theory) to increase. The fundamental laws of physics are ultimately reversible, so why we should perceive that eggs break, but don't spontaneously come back together really has to do with the likelihood of events occurring. If we took a box of evenly distributed gas and watched it for a while from within the box with no other frame of reference, we'd be hard pressed to say time exists at all. Nothing happens. We exist and watch a homogenous stew where nothing "ever" (a tricky word to use depending on how long you plan on watching) happens. If, however we were observers in a box of gas in which all the gas was nicely organized in one corner by a force field and then watched what happened when the force field turned off, we definitely would see something happen. Over time, the gas would spread itself out to equilibrium so that the density of gas was roughly the same everywhere in the box. While that was happening, we'd be able to "see" something - a process unfolding before our eyes that could tell us what was "before" (gas was organized in a corner) and what came "after" (gas was evenly distributed). It's the viewing of these processes that defines time for us observers in the box we call the universe.

Knowing this fact about our universe tells us a lot about the place we live. We know, if that's the case, that the entropy of the universe must have been relatively lower in the past for us to perceive that the entropy of the universe is increasing (which it always is according to the second law of thermodynamics) all the time. Why should that have been the case? If entropy always increases, why was the past a time of relatively low entropy? Did something make it that way? Some law of nature that we're unaware of? Also, if entropy always increases, can it increases without limit? And what happens, if we take our box of gas analogy and apply it to the universe, when we reach a point where all the matter in our universe is evenly distributed and relatively homogenous? Does nothing more happen once the universe plays out this cosmic evolution?

The problem with cyclic cosmologies is that contractions of the universe tend to involve a reversal of this well-established principal. If everything was neat in the beginning (condensed to a single point, a singularity) and has become more spread out and diffuse or messy since then (a la cosmic inflation), and this is a natural thing for the universe to do, how does the universe then decide to reverse this? Traditional thinking was that gravity would catch hold of inflation in the future and cause a re-compression of the universe, but think for a moment what that would mean for the arrow of time. Once gravity starts pulling things back in and reversing the expansion of the universe according to the clockwork laws of motion discovered by Isaac Newton, it would appear to us that the universe was operating in reverse! Light would leave telescopes and be absorbed by stars, which break down heavier elements into lighter ones only to dissipate into clouds of gas while you undigest and throw up your scrambled eggs before they uncook themselves and reassemble back into their shells and roll back into the hens from whence they came. The disorder of the universe would decrease if this were so, violating the cherished second law of thermodynamics while completely honoring the reversible laws of Newtonian mechanics. The observed acceleration of receding galaxies has kind of put a damper on people who still advocate a Big Crunch scenario.

What Carroll and Chen have done is to provide a model where time always moves in a single direction, entropy always increases, yet occasionally, new big bangs happen in new universes that add to the total amount of disorder in the multiverse without bound. The thinking goes as follows: The big bang occurred some 14 billion years ago (I'll get around to proposed causes toward the end, it'll make more sense then) and an infinitely dense and energetic point of space-time begins to expand and cool forming matter and giving rise to the particular forces of physics we all know and love. As the universe expands due to the presence of a positive vacuum energy (the so-called dark energy responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe) it grows more diffuse until eventually it reaches thermal equilibrium trillions upon trillions of years from now. Stars have burnt themselves out and dissipated and everything has broken down so finely that we have a nice cosmic sand of background radiation, photons, electrons and other fundamental particles spread so thinly that they make today's definition of a vacuum seem ridiculously inadequate. At this point "nothing more happens" and the universe is dead. But statistically speaking, given an infinite amount of time, even tremendously unlikely events do happen. Subatomic particles may "coincidentally" come together in just the right way to form Boltzmann brains, single stars, even galaxies, but these aberrations would be statistical flukes in a sea of nothingness. But that's not all that's happening in the universe. The vacuum itself, even the vacuum of space today, is hardly a true, empty vacuum. In fact, random quantum fluctuations are occurring by the untold trillions in every cubic meter of space. Virtual particles spring into existence before self-annihilating fast enough so that no one would even know that the law of conservation of energy had ever been violated. According to proponents of the cosmological constant form of dark energy, the vacuum is also home to a repellant form of energy that is the root cause of the inflation of the universe. Inflation energy could be caused by a sort of false vacuum energy, imbuing the space in the universe with the energy necessary to expand. What appears to us to be a vacuum at it's lowest energy level may only be a relatively low level. Lower levels of vacuum energy could exist (see above). It's natural for this vacuum energy to seek out it's lowest energy level, and over extended periods of time it would, creating a true vacuum field in the universe. These energy fields, however, given an infinite amount of time would constantly fluctuate via the Uncertainty Principle in localized regions of space-time, creating bubbles of false vacuum again (equivalent to a ball spontaneously running uphill rather than down, but perhaps that's a bad analogy), that would naturally want to expand. Most of the time, the pressure from the space around these bubbles would cause them to collapse again, and prevent them from inflating the way small soap bubbles on the surface of your bath water are collapsed by the surface tension on the bubble and the air around pushing it back down. Every once in a while though, the energy level in these false vacuum pockets would be enough to overcome the "surface tension" and they would expand again. These regions would bubble "up" and separate themselves from our universe being briefly connected to ours through a wormhole, before that collapses as well and the bubble is free to "float off" on its own and continue to inflate free from the pressure of the surrounding space-time (see image above). The bubble would start off as a microscopic point with tremendously high energy (sound familiar?) and expand on it's own, cooling down so that some of the energy could form into matter. This new baby universe would be free to develop its own rules and laws of physics and sprout its own baby universes from its own future pockets of false vacuum energy. In this way, the universe continues to thermal equilibrium completely in line with the second law of thermodynamics while providing an out for the creation of new universes with "relatively" low entropy to expand and follow the second law to their own thermal equilibrium, increasing the total entropy of the multiverse ad infinitum. These events would be statistically exceedingly rare, and if they did occur, we wouldn't even realize it. All of the dramatic energy of expansion and explosion would happen in a universe detached from ours. As Carroll suggests,

"...from the point of view of an outside observer in the parent universe, the entire process is almost unnoticeable. What it looks like is a fluctuation of thermal particles that come together to form a tiny region of very high density - in fact, a black hole. But it's a microscopic black hole, with a tiny entropy , which then evaporates via Hawking radiation as quickly as it formed. The birth of a baby universe is much less traumatic than the birth of a baby human.

Indeed, if this story is true, a baby universe could be born right in the room where you're reading this book, and you would never notice." (Carroll, 358)

Which of course, begs the question: has it happened before? Carroll, again,

"It's not very likely; in all the spacetime of the universe we can currently observe, chances are it never happened."(Carroll, 359)

But apparently, it could.

Carroll, Sean. From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. London: Plume Books, 2010.